What's next for Playstation and Xbox?

If you have been keeping up with console news over the past few weeks, you would know there has been no shortage of intriguing stories pointing towards significant revamps of traditional console gaming, particularly in the war between Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation.

The biggest announcement thus far has been the announcement of Sony skipping E3. This marks the first time in 24 years that a PlayStation conference will not be hosted at the world's largest video game expo. Furthermore, the PlayStation Fan Experience, an event which has been hosted annually since 2014, will not be running this year.

There are other theories which can be tied to Sony pulling out of multiple public events; for starters, Sony has no new projects to announce on the PS4, which also points towards an imminent arrival of the PS5. This has been backed up further with details surfacing that Sony has submitted a patent for a controller with a touchscreen display. The PlayStation 4 ushered in the trackpad so it would make sense for the next iteration to go one step further. Sony could have also seen how much of a success the Nintendo Switch has been and have discovered ways to implement touchscreen facilities to their offerings. Finally, Kotaku has reported there are PS5 dev kits out in the wild, but the consensus is that the console is not set to release until 2020, which is in line with many forecaster's expectations.

In Microsoft's corner, things haven't been quiet either. Microsoft has confirmed they will be attending E3, but they have a few tricks up their sleeve for this generation. One innovation which has already been announced is the Project xCloud streaming service, designed to expand the Xbox gaming library to a far greater range of devices. Internal testing is underway, but a public beta rollout is expected to begin next year.

As for hardware, rumours of a Disc-less Xbox One being released next year has been gaining traction. As well as a shift to digital-only games, this would make sense to coincide with the release of Project xCloud and those who plan to use their system as a Game Pass machine. Removing the disc drive could also provide benefits in terms of size and cost, reducing the price of entry into the Xbox hardware ecosystem.

So all this points to a lot of exciting announcements, and potentially hardware, to look forward to as soon as next year. Whether Sony has a response to Microsoft's farewell bid to the current gen with an affordable Disc-less console, but perhaps their silence is indicative of their dedication to delivering something truly next gen.